


Freelance

by merriman



Category: The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Alternate Timeline, Backstory, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 18:57:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merriman/pseuds/merriman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being a queen of Fillory means riffling her life between timelines and watching people die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freelance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiraMira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiraMira/gifts).



> This whole story is a major spoiler for the end of the book it's based on. Please only read on if you've either finished the book or don't mind spoilers.
> 
> I would like to thank my beta for helping me out and my recipient for requesting precisely what I had in mind when I offered _The Magicians_.

There are many fountains in the City. Everyone who visits it sees them, central to every square. Some are open, some are capped, one has flooded, one is bone dry. One is not in a square. It sits in the corner of a courtyard in front of a majestic building that could be a church or could be a tomb. The fountain is covered by unbreakable glass and while one cannot go through it, one may look. In the fountain, a life can be seen, playing out like a shuffled deck of cards.

 

~~~Forth~~~

There was a certain scent that you got when magic combined with burnt stone and wool and human bodies. It was sharp and unpleasant and not entirely unlike ozone, but not entirely like it either. It was its own horrific thing, a testament to violence and anger and the nasty things people could do to one another if given the power.

Jane could see a shoe sitting in what was left of the doorway to the tomb. It was smoking, as if it was out of some hideous cartoon. Martin was still in there. He was still feasting on his win, but soon he would come looking. He would sniff her out and hunt her down and crunch, that would be the end of the Chatwins.

And so Jane pulled out the watch made for her by the dwarves. It was beautiful, really. She’d stolen a moment here and there - and one really could steal a moment with a watch that turned back time - and admired it. Taking the face off, she’d found that even the tiniest gear inside had been engraved with even tinier symbols. Whether that was part of the magic or simply an aesthetic touch, she wasn’t sure. But it was truly the most amazing thing she’d held, outside of the Fillory buttons.

“Sister dear! I’m coming for you!” a voice called from the tomb. Martin still sounded like Martin, which was really horribly unfair, but that was the world for you.

Jane looked down at the watch. This would be the tenth try. She flicked off the catch that held the little winding knobs in place and carefully spun them. It shouldn’t have been so easy. She shouldn’t have had so much practice. Maybe this time she would find the right children. This time they would find the right spells. This time they would defeat the monster her brother had become and Fillory would, at last, be saved.

~~~And Back~~~

Travelling by button was far different from the usual method of entering Fillory. Of course, the usual method was more a collection of methods and none of them were ever quite the same. You didn’t tend to go to Fillory the same way twice. Crawling through a clock, stolen from your bed, it was always different. And that was what made the buttons distinctive. Every trip was the same.

Jane had spent years hoping to find the buttons and desperate to use them to get back to Fillory, but once she had one in her grasp she found she didn’t really like it after all. It took a few trips back and forth between Earth and the Neitherlands that were the waypoint prior to Fillory before she got the hang of it. It was impossible to map the Neitherlands but she tried to keep notes at first. The rest of the city there was tempting too, full of closed buildings and more fountains that led to who knew how many wondrous places.

But Jane had a job to do. She was going to Fillory to fulfil a quest. Her very own quest. Not like the first time she’d gone with her sister and they’d spent the whole time just talking and looking around. That wasn’t what you were supposed to do in Fillory. You were supposed to be summoned there and then help in some way. You were supposed to be a hero, or a heroine in Jane’s case.

The wind was impossible not to notice when she arrived. The first village she stopped in had nailed boards over the windows of all of the buildings. The mayor of the village (who was also the innkeeper and a trapper) explained to Jane that it seemed to seek out crevices and cracks and once in a building would whip its way around, knocking things off shelves and rattling furniture.

“You know they even shut down the windmills up at Castle Whitespire?” he told her, whispering the information like it was a state secret. Except the wind was howling so loud outside the inn that Jane could barely hear him. He repeated himself three times before she got it all and when she did she felt a cool sense of purpose.

This was her quest.

She thanked the innkeeper and declined his offer of a billowy in-fashion cloak to whip around in the wind on her journey. It seemed horribly impractical and she needed to get to Castle Whitespire quickly. There was no time to waste now that her quest had begun.

~~~And Forth~~~

There was a girl named Alice who hadn’t been invited to Brakebills. Jane had snuck into Fogg’s office and peeked at one of the globes and there she was, a spot of such pure and perfect light she almost could have been accepted on the spot, exam or no. And yet no invitation had been made and Alice had never come to Brakebills. Not in any of the timelines Jane had made. There’d been countless combinations of students before, but none had worked. The closest she’d gotten so far had been when she’d maneuvered herself into Quentin Coldwater’s path, making certain he’d come to the exam.

And now there was Alice. Jane was certain she would be a key player now that she’d found her. The trick was to get her there without obviously assisting her. If Fogg found out he’d probably put better alarm spells on his office and that would put a kink in her plans. He might even catch on to what she was doing and do something rash, like banning Jane from the school, or using Lloyd’s Telescopic Sight to check for unfinished timelines. She couldn’t have that.

A little investigation revealed why young Alice had been excluded. Her brother had lost control of some truly powerful magic and burned himself into a niffin, poor lad. And yes, that was unfortunate, but it didn’t figure into Jane’s plans and so she left it be. If it turned out she needed him she’d have to go back further and do something about the mess with Mayakovsky. But with him saved that might change Mayakovsky and with Mayakovsky changed Quentin would never truly master the skills he would need in Fillory and so it was better left untouched for the moment.

In the end it didn’t take much fiddling. Just a few minor enchantments to get Alice moving in the right direction and once Jane had led her to the right area Alice all but made a bee-line for the school.

Jane sat in the branches of an enormous old oak tree and watched Alice head unerringly for the campus as if she could see it already. The girl had such promise. If all went well, this would be the last time she would have to do this.

~~~And Back~~~

“My lady?” The castle staff wasn’t quite sure what to do with Jane. She wasn’t a queen, but she wasn’t one of them either. So they’d settled on ‘queen presumptive’ and called her ‘My lady’ and Jane let it go. There’d be time for crowns later.

“My lady,” the girl at the door repeated. She looked to be only a year or two younger than Jane herself, but such things could be deceptive in Fillory. “The windswept party. They’ve returned.”

Jane grabbed her cloak and hurried to follow the girl through the corridors of the castle. She tried her best to ignore the vacant silence that filled the whole place but it was difficult to avoid it entirely. The quiet had an eerie quality to it, not made any better by the wind howling loudly enough to be heard even in the deepest storerooms in the cellars of the castle.

The pegasi and eagles and griffins who had let the wind carry them had been ushered into one of the large reception halls on the main floor of the castle. Jane curtsied to them as she came into the room and noted the nodding of heads and shuffling of wings that passed for the same from the winged creatures.

“We are so glad to have you all safely returned to us,” she told them. “Can you tell us what you saw? Any hint as to the source of the wind, or how to stop it?”

The first pegasus, a bold female with gold stippled through her wings who went by the name of Brightswift, stepped forward and bowed her head to Jane. In the doorways to the room the castle staff was gathering. They crowded in, waiting to hear what the travelers had to tell them.

“We cannot speak of it,” Brightswift said softly. “We are sorry. We cannot speak of it and we cannot stop it and we will not go back. I apologize, my lady. You must face the wind alone.”

~~~And Forth~~~

There was something still missing. Jane watched the entrance exams through a scrying dish from her perch in the clock tower at Brakebills. She had Alice and Quentin and Janet and Josh and Eliot and Penny and Amanda and Julia and they would hopefully be picking up more friends, Anais and Richard, if all went well. But something was missing. Something was wrong.

The last time through it had all been going so well until the night before Penny’s arrival and his announcement about Fillory. The whole group had been drinking, which was something Jane had never been able to fix and eventually given up on when she realized that by the time they reached the final battle none of the drinking in New York would matter in the slightest. But still, they’d been drinking and one thing led to another and there was Quentin, rekindling that old flame for Julia.

That had to be it. Jane stared into the scrying dish and focused in on Julia. She seemed to be doing well enough on the exam. It took as long as it needed to, but every other time she’d finished an hour before Quentin.

Julia had to fail. She had to stay out of Brakebills and away from Quentin and the rest. Yes, Jane reasoned, Julia was a firm spellcaster with a good instinct for magic that always seemed to lead her to discovering things others ignored. She usually developed some impressive tricks with spells others assumed to be flashy but pointless. Julia would draw out the unknown aspects of them, bringing side effects to the fore and blindsiding you with the unexpected.

But she wasn’t essential. Not once had she actually made an impact on Martin, whereas Quentin had done so once or twice and Alice several times. No, she needed the two of them and she needed them without the history between Julia and Quentin.

It wasn’t easy, doing magic through a scrying dish. Theoretically they were supposed to be passive and impossible to work through, but Jane had found that you simply had to have the right frame of mind about reality and dimensional shifts. And a few subtle changes in Julia’s concentration resulted in Julia’s sudden disappearance from the exam room.

The group would go on without her and Jane would see what differences Julia’s absence would make.

~~~And Back~~~

It had been both good and bad to have Ember with her after leaving the Darkling Woods. A large part of Jane had simply wanted to curl up on the Cozy Horse as it bore them across Fillory to the mountains of the dwarves. Her brother was a monster, transformed from his familiar-if-irritable self into something sinister and almost demonic and if anywhere in Fillory was the right place for a good cry, the back of the Cozy Horse was it. But Ember wanted to talk about what they would do next.

This was what being a queen of Fillory entailed, Jane realized. You had to sit up and talk strategy when what you really wanted to do was lie down and sleep. You had to think about allies and enemies and maps and magic. You couldn’t leave it to someone else who knew more because you were all there was and the only person who knew more was the person you were going up against.

There was no time to get emotional or try to figure out why this had all happened. You just had to forge ahead. Go to visit the ever unpredictable dwarves and hope that they would help.

The Cozy Horse delivered them to a bunker-like entrance to the dwarven mines a few hours after they’d left the Darkling Woods. Ember escorted Jane down into the depths, greeting each and every dwarf by name until they’d reached a low-ceilinged hall full of esoteric mechanical devices and the leader of the dwarves, Master Goldseam.

“We have need of your help,” Jane told Goldseam. “My brother has defied the laws of Fillory and perverted himself. He will destroy this land if we cannot stop him. We have come to the conclusion that we need some method of specialized travel. Time travel, if at all possible.”

Master Goldseam stood in front of her, looking up impassively. Slowly, he turned his head to look at Ember, then he nodded.

“That damned wind is going to ruin everything,” he muttered. “Come on. I’ve got just the thing in the works already.”

Two days later Jane left the dwarves, magical watch in hand and no idea how to work it. The dwarves had been perfectly hospitable while the watch was still being made, but upon its completion had hurried her and Ember out again. They had things to do, they explained. They were going to go deeper, try and escape the wind that way. Just in case Jane couldn’t pull it off, they said. Not that they had anything but the utmost confidence in her.

Jane was rather sure that last had not been entirely sincere.

~~~And Forth~~~

It had been tempting to speed up time a little, spin the knobs and ignore whatever would happen in between the end of the battle in the tomb and later. She’d had enough of fiddling with time, though, and left the watch untouched for the six months it took Quentin to heal from his injuries. The others had used the button to leave again and Jane had watched them go through her scrying dish, now perched in the clockworks of Castle Whitespire. They were still shut down and Jane suspected that they would need to pry a few dwarves out of their warrens to repair them.

Once upon a time, Jane had entertained dreams of being a queen of Fillory, sitting on a throne at Whitespire with a crown on her head. Wandering the empty halls of the castle now, however, she decided it was time for someone else to rule. She wasn’t really cut out for the queen business. And now the watch was broken too, more so than the castle. With the lack of the constant ticking that had been her companion for the past however many years, Jane found herself smiling. She really was the girl who stopped time now.

Quentin headed off on some quest of his own and Jane let him go, letting him think she was long gone and off on her own adventures. Her quest was finished, after all. Martin was dead and the watch was destroyed and there would be no more back and forth and no more timelines and no more watching the children she’d gathered so painstakingly fail, over and over. No, she wasn’t cut out for being a queen. That would just end up being more of the same.

Jane sat out on the terrace outside the hall she’d once greeted pegasi and eagles in. She stared out at the expanse of Fillory, full of wonders as always. There were likely more quests to be taken. More problems to solve. Jane stood up from her seat and hovered her fingers over the mismatched button on her shirt.

“My lady?” a small elfin girl asked from the doorway. She looked like the same girl who’d been there when the pegasi and griffins and eagles had arrived but that had been so long ago. She was probably a many times great granddaughter. “Excuse me, but some of the others were wondering, shall we plan for the coronation?”

Jane smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think so. Not yet. Not for me.” She took a deep breath and brushed her fingers over the button. And as she emerged from the fountain into the City she smiled. There was still so much to do.


End file.
